A rational look at local food
From
Grist Magazine:
Local haterade: Authors say locavores do more harm than good
Pierre Desrochers and Hiroko Shimizu say they know what�s wrong with the food system: local food purists. In their new book, The Locavore�s Dilemma: In Praise of the 10,000-Mile Diet, the husband-and-wife team (a University of Toronto geography professor and an economist) argue that the excitement over this movement is misguided to the point of having �utterly disastrous� effects. �If widely adopted,� they write, �either voluntarily or through political mandates, locavorism can only result in higher costs and increased poverty, greater food insecurity, less food safety and much more significant environmental damage than is presently the case� [emphasis theirs].
An interesting observation:
Q. Was there anything that surprised you as you got deeper into the issues?
A. I was surprised by the number of local food movements I discovered in the past, but I was not surprised to see that they all failed. There was a local food movement in the British empire in the 1920s. And it turns out that even the British empire was not big enough to have a successful local food movement. The first world war cut Germany off from the rest of the world, so they had to revert to local food. And of course people starved there, and they had a few bad crops, and all the problems that long-distance trade had solved came back with a vengeance.
A fascinating look at a complex subject. The comments are worth reading too.
Posted by DaveH at July 2, 2012 2:51 PM